they brought their printing habits with an. and a lot of cases, that violated what the temperance movement thought what it meant to be a good american. this country are, we don't drink but we aren't middle-class, properties and people and you catholics, you need to be a. so a lot of the cases of temperance, the temperance movement really targeted at the catholics to try to reform their ways. prohibition went into effect a year after the 18th amendment was passed. . .

>> [inaudible] are a thousand times worse than the ones -- [inaudible] >> and, of course, prohibition went into effect the next morning, but things turned out quite differently than expected. >> john barleycorn. >> that was an old nickname for alcohol, often known as demon rum. [laughter] >> so when you're doing your tour, when you're done with the cavalry baptist church, what's done? >> we jump on the subway and go to the woodrow wilson house, and he was the president when prohibition went into effect in

1920. >> this was a portion of a booktv program. you can view the entire program and many other booktv programs online. go to booktv.org, type the name of the author or book into the search area in the upper left-hand corner of the page. select the watch link. now you can view the entire program. you might also explore the recently on booktv box or the featured video box to find recent and featured programs. >> in her book, "can sexism in america," professor, writer and commentator barbara berg presents a documented argument that women in america hasn't come nearly as far as is generally believed. this event is 50 minutes. >> thank you very much and thank you, barnes & noble, for hosting this event. thank you all for coming.

he pulled me by my hair, and he dragged me up 36 metal steps, each one i could feel as my cheek went against them making a mark in my face. i had to spend weeks in the hospital, and i will never look the same again. this story was not the worst i heard, far from the worst, n., while i was researching this book. but when i told a colleague about it, he said, sexism? are you kidding? there's no more sexism in america. that's so passe. and actually that's pretty much the kind of attitude i ran into when i first began to do the study. alive and well, my dentist asks, after hillary almost got the democratic nomination and sarah

palin had the number two spot on the republican ticket? how can you say sexism is alive and well? i wonder if he'd say barack obama's presidency has obliterated racial discrimination in america, but before i can ask he says, besides, with so much wrong in this country, why are you worrying about women? he lifts a dental mirror from the tray. since i have a policy never to argue with someone about to put a sharp instrument in my mouth, i don't respond as i want to. but my dentist, thoughtful and progressive though he is, has just proven my point. women are part of this country can. 51% of it. and the problems facing us as a nation fall mightily upon them. now, certainly we're far from the dark ages before the second wave of the woman's movement. back then the moment you were zipped into your pink blanket

sleeper, your future was pretty much dictated. you didn't get to play with your brother's erector set or blocks. you got to play with dolls. when you went on to high school, you weren't allowed to take electronics, mechanics, automotive shop. you got to take cooking, and in my case, sewing. now, the object -- i see many nodding faces here. [laughter] now, the object of our sewing class was to make a jumper that we actually had to wear the last day of school, and we were all really excited about this except if you were like me. i grew three-and-a-half inches my seventh grade year. therefore, by the time june rolled around, my jumper was so short on me, i was not allowed to wear it into the classroom. when you graduated from high school if there wasn't enough money in the family for both

boys and girls to go can on to college, most likely you would have to stay home while your brother went on to college. and that was considered okay because, after all, your only goal in life was to get married and have children. but let's say that didn't happen immediately and can you had to work -- you had to work and you were, perhaps, good in math against all odds. and the reason i say against all odds was because back then the mantra was girls couldn't do math in the same way that girls couldn't be good athletes, couldn't be good friends. couldn't drive cars. but suppose you were, had somebody who really, you were someone who really, really had study thed math. well, you could only find a job under the female-only part of the wand ad section. -- want ad section. there were female jobs and there were male jobs. yo -- so you might be able to find a job as a bookkeeper, but

you would never find a job as a financial manager, as an auditor, as a treasurer. it was a time when if you were single, you were refused a credit card in your own name. you would be refused a mortgage in your own name. you could even be refused service in a restaurant if you were dining alone. but you could never, never refuse to have sex with a husband. a diseased husband, an alcoholic husband, with any husband. it was a time when it was said women asked to get raped and needed a good slap. now, since that time our commitment and conversation and connection to the whole issue of sexism has waxed and waned in the american psyche. we saw how during the 2008

primary and presidential election it became a hot topic only to disappear again. and actually what we saw during that period of time was only a small, small outcropping from the solid bedrock of ma songny in this country -- ma songny in this country can. i think it's fair to say that for the past 30 years we have been considered to be a post-feminist society. but let me ask you something, what is post-feminist about a society where a doctor who happens to perform late-term abortions is murdered in cold blood in his church on a sunday with his whole family present? what is post-feminist about a society where before this last election one in four school children thought illegal --

illegal -- for a woman to be president of the united states? what is post-feminist about a society where our ads and television commercials are demeaning to women such as one for a very popular chain store that chose an adolescent girl lying on a target with a bull's eye right between her legs? what is post-feminist about a society with a subprime mortgage debacle fell with particular hardship on poor women and women of color? these were women who were struggling to have a piece of the american dream. some were single moms, some were elderly moms. and when they started out, their mortgage rates were rates that they could afford only to see them adjusted and adjusted and adjusted upward until they had to forfeit their homes. iowa knee that hill -- iowa ania

hill who's a law professor at brandeis university, has just completed a study in which she found all women no matter what their background were charged more than men, even men in the same differently -- comparable, i should say, financial situations. what is post-feminist about a society where movies, g-rated movies, the ones that we think are most appropriate for our young people, have 75% of the characters male and overwhelmingly even more than 75% of these characters have the speaking parts? now, one of the i guess i could call it mixed blessings of doing this research is that i got to watch a lot of it's and movies -- television and movies that i wouldn't ord --

ordinarily have seen. so one of them was bee story, a very popular movie. barry bee is the star, and he has, obviously, a very large speaking part. there are only two female characters who speak. one of them is barry's mom who is a kind of stereotypical intrusive helicopter mom, and because she's a bee she actually can hover over barry. the other character is vanessa bloom. she's a human being and the florist. now, you'd think because she's a human being and barry's a bee that she would be more capable, that she could navigate the human world. but not so. vanessa's always getting into trouble, and barry has to bail her out. their mission, the plot of the movie, revolves around barry and vanessa trying to save the world mr. the extinction of all of the flowers. and to accomplish this aim they

come an deer an airplane -- common deer an airplane. now, either one of them has ever piloted an airplane before, so vanessa is sitting in the pilot seat trying to figure out how to do it, and barry is giving her directions. and he keeps giving her directions, and she gets increasingly flustered until he slapped her on the face and a fight ensues. what are our children learning from this, i'm sure, very, very unintended message? that women are ornamental, annoying, irritating and then when they get out of line, they need a good slap. so post-feminist, no, not really. and maybe it's not been such a surprise that in the global gender index the united states ranks 2th in the world. -- 27th in the world behind cuba and rivet wane lithuania.

now, let me just tell you what this index is. it's a study of 160 countries that hold 90% of the world's population. and they compare countries on the basis of education, employment, how much representation we have in government and health and survival. so let's just start with education. in education title ix has been chipped away of its funding even though every study has shown that when young women engage in sports, they're not likely to drink, to do drugs, to become teenage mothers or develop eating disorders either way, either obesity or become too thin, and they do better in school. sexual harassment. the guidelines have disappeared from our federal web site even

though the most recent study details about 90% of all school students say they have been harassed sexually at one time or another by either their classmates or their teachers. starting in 2005 the education aleck bity act began to be funded, and the bush administration using a small unknown loophole in the no child left behind act gave broad latitude to public schools to create separate classrooms and schools for girls and boys. now, we know historically that separate is not equal. and under this new ordnance, they don't even have to be separate and equal, they have to be separate and substantially equal.

and this is given way to school administrators and principals and deans all across the country returning the use of gender stereotypes in the classroom so that as one woman said, this allows boys to be boys and girls to be girls. i actually sometimes think it's much, much better to reach girls by using things that they understand like examples from shopping and examples from cooking. at present 34% of female high school students have said that they have been dissuaded from going on in math classes by their teachers. and i heard story after story after story of young women like rachel who was a fabulous math student. she was so good in math that she decided to take the highest class offered in her school which was calculus. there were four girls, ten boys. she said, the boys all sat on one side of the room.

the teacher would sit on his desk, and he talked to the boys. the examples he would use were always about football, and he called on the boys proportionally more than he called on the girls. two of them dropped out after the first week. the other two tried to stick it out. they went to their dean. when their dean spoke to the teacher, things got worse. slowly one left and then rachel left. and she told me when i spoke to her that the experience was so bad that she doubts that she will continue with math in college. the nea has just written a study that talks about the crying need to get more young women in what they call the stem class, science, technology, engineering and mathematics. but how are we going to get more young women to take computer and technology the classes when 71% of teachers interviewed said

that the boys do well because of their aptitude and girls do well, hmm, pause they really, really -- because they really, really, really work hard and because it's good luck. and every study has pointed out that unless young people become computer savvy by the time they're 1212 years old -- 12 years old, they are really going to be frozen out of the workplace. now, let's look at the workplace. another area where the united states did pretty well. gender discrimination abounds whether it's the gender pay gap that starts, incidentally, right after college and incleese creases over -- increases over a the course of a lifetime, whether it's discrimination against older women in the work force or whether it's the fact that in 2005 the bureau of labor statistics stopped collect canning data on women workers making it almost impossible for

journalists, researchers, associatologists to -- sociologists to track trends in women's employment. are they discriminated against, what are their wages, what are their needs, we simply, simply don't know. at present let's look for a moment at the world of academia. considered a good area for women. women make up p -- 50% of instructors and assistant professors but only 27% of tenured faculty in four-year colleges. when the american association of university women tried to investigate this, they came up with very, very interesting information. in a report that they have published called tenure denied, they found that one of the most recent additions to the reasons why women are denied tenure is lack of congeniality. what is lack of congeniality, they said. well, the women professors

didn't want to take notes at the faculty meetings, they didn't want to be the ones who went to the coffee machines and got the coffee. in other words, lack of congeniality, according to this report, translated into women not wanting to play over and over and over again the subservient world. business world is much the same. at present women, again, make up 50% of managers and professionals of fortune 500 companies, but only 15% of the officers and 2% of the ceos. now, i want you all to close your eyes for a minute and picture a leader. okay. you can open now. [laughter] if you pictured a man, then you're like over 90% of people in america whose automatic responses think leader, think man. this was the result of three different studies done by

catalyst. in which they discovered that americans' default setting on leadership is male and that anytime a woman acts in ways that are a little more assertive, a little more demanding in the business world she's considered an unnatural leader because she's a woman. but if she tries to be more collaborative, if she tries to be softer and gentler, well, forget it. she's too wishy washy to be a leader. it's a real, real double can bind, and we see the same thing in the arts, we see it in dance, we see it in music. in fact, a woman architect said, you know, i'm beginning to think that something like the bermuda triangle effect is happening to my coworkers. there were plenty of them in the pipeline, and from the 1970s there certainly should be, but they disappear when it comes to higher positions. there is so much discrimination

against mothers in the workplace that it's actually even earned it own name, the maternal ball. we are one of only two industrialized missions that doesn't offer paid maternity leave, and when women take maternity leave, they come back to a very different world. one woman who was in advertising told me about how she had worked 60 hours a week over and over and over again to train this temporary male employer to take her place. when she came back after her maternity leave, he had her desk and her office, she was down the hall. about two or three months later, she was told there wasn't enough work for both of them, and she was fired. another woman came back from her maternity leave, and she was given so little responsibility, she was so demoted that she finally exclaimed, i had a baby,

not a lobotomy! now, for women who've looked for child care we are very, very remiss. child care funding has been, again, chipped away and chipped away, and we have no federal standards regulating the number of children who can be in the care of any one provider. and when i visited child care centers in this country, i saw such a vast disparity between those that were wonderful and good where kids were learning and engaged and active and those that were so dirty and smelly, honestly, none of us would have wanted to leave our pets there, let alone our children. but these are sometimes the options, the only options that working women have. because we know in this country the majority of women still work in service positions with very, very few options. think about this. sheila, a woman who loads trucks

in california, was getting ready for work. her 3-year-old came gagging, gagging, he couldn't can catch his breath. she rushed him to the emergency room. he had to undergo emergency surgery to have a quarter that was stuck in his throat removed. she called the trucking company as soon as she got him into the doctor, but this was not the first time that family emergency had interfered with her work because we know even in 2009 it is still women who deal with family crises be they our children or our aging parents. they let her come back on probation. the next time it happened she was fired. unlike some 145 other countries that mandate paid leave for workers when they are sick or paid leave for workers when their children are sick, we do not. so what does this mean? it means either we bring our children to day care when

they're sick which is really not good for the child or for the other people, or as many women have told me we say that we're the ones who are sick, and we stay home with our children, and then we go to work when we're sick. and even though -- and i'll talk about this later -- we have an appallingly high infant mortality rate in this country, unlike 10 # countries -- 107 country cans we do not mandate and protect right for a woman to express breast milk at work even though the american pediatric association recommended strongly that babies be fed breast milk for the first six months of their life to increase their immunity. now, that was the good news. okay? now on for the worse news, the areas that we don't do so well in. we don't do very well in representation in government. in fact, before the election but in 2008 we were 54th in the

world. now, maybe we can understand why. it's a hard thing for a woman to put herself out there and to try to run for office. we've seen what's happened to women who have done this. we all know what happened in many ways to the remarks about hillary clinton, the same is true for nancy pelosi, but it is not only democratic women who get attacked. condoleezza rice, for example, when she was visiting germany happened to have been wearing a long coat and boots. a reporter gushed over those boots, said that she looked so sexy in them that she looked like a dominatrix. and harriet myers who was a possible supreme court nominee was so ridiculed for her appearance, her bangs, her too dark eye shadow, the buttons on her suit which were, quote, the size of cappuccino cups. you would think, honestly, if

you read this that the reason harriet myers was not the appointed to the supreme court was not because she lacked experience, but because she was a fashion faux pas. when reporters talk about a woman's appearance rather than the quality of their work and their experience, when they do this, it is a way of demeaning them and putting them down. now, the next category we also do not well in, and that is health and survival. we're only 37th in the world. and i'll tell you what health and survival is. this is a category that looks at the comparative years that men and women might live taking out years cut short by illness, by malnutrition and violence. violence against women reigns supreme in american culture.

whether it's our popular culture in which pornography is increasingly graphic and available, for example, a friend of mine who teaches at the service academies said that the cadets are so comfortable with pornography that when she goes over to them in the library, they don't even bother to switch off the screen, and she's a department chair. they think it's just fine. or the lyrics of our popular rappers like eminem in his song, "just the two of us," where he gives his son instructions to help him bury mommy in the bottom of the lake after the father has slit the mother's throat. or the very popular videos called hunting bambi in which bambi is actually the a naked woman, except for running shoes,

and the men hunting her wear combat clothing and ride in jeeps and hunt her with paintball guns with the idea of shooting her, and then she becomes theirs. our most popular form of entertainment, television, is filled with violence against women so much so that a tv create cantic in florida said that we should really call a lot of modern television series die, women, die series. and he said, when they want to sell the series, they always put the woman in chains. and the same is true of our second most popular form of entertainment, electronic gaming. whether it's custer's revenge, mortal combat, road rash iii there are new and different ways of slaughtering women. and these are ways in which the player, the gamer, advances.

the worst games according to the american psychological association are what are called first-person shooter games. take duke 'em nuke 'em. the gamer, duke, actually the shoots women as a way of getting ahead. he enters strip clubs, he enters porn theaters where he sees women tied up on poles, naked women saying, duke, kill me! kill me! and he does. or the very, very popular grand theft auto, now in its fourth edition. again, gamer advances by murdering women. there has been so much work now on the correlation between violence in entertainment and real-life violence that it's really not even disputen. disputable. but electronic gaming according to the american psychiatric association is really the worst

because you are totally engaged in the game. the graphics are real, the music is real, the gamers have said that they really don't appreciate where the fantasy ends and the reality begins. and you know we have had numerous examples of real-life violence in this country directed against women. whether it was the shooting in the amish schoolhouses a few years ago or more recently the killing in the sports club in pittsburgh, women were absolutely targeted and executed. bob herbert was the rare mainstream journalist to write about this in an op-ed piece, the first one that he did, and he did a second one. the first one was called, "why aren't we shocked?" mr. herbert said if it was any other group, if it had been black people or white people or christian people or muslim people separated out

and slaughtered, we would have been in an uproar. but we weren't shocked. nobody noted it. you know why? because we're so accustomed to violence against women in this country. every year between four and six million women are assaulted by their domestic partners. and unless you're a celebrity like the late swim suit model jasmine fiori who was murdered by her husband, we don't hear about the three women every single day who are killed in america. and violence is spreading to teen relationships also. there's not just an uptick according to steve frazier from st. paul/minneapolis who works with the family violence unit, we are seeing an uptick that is

off the charts. now, a lot of people who work with domestic violence victims blame the recession, and the recession has a lot to do with it. they talk about the fact that the would-be abuser is home much more, and i'm really now only talking about male to female domestic violence although we all know that it does go the other way as well. the would-be abuser is home more, and the would-be victim has fewer places to escape. shelters are closing, there are no hotlines available the way they used to be. and so, of course, we're seeing a spike in domestic violence. but there's another reason as well, because actually if you follow the numbers, domestic violence has been increasing in this country for many, many years. it's not just a product of the 2008 recession. and a lot has to do with the threat that's been posed to masculinity in this country from a variety of factors.

the sneak, devastating attack on our soil, the seemingly endless and unwinnable wars in afghanistan, the tarnished american image abroad, and, of course, the recession have all threatened manhood and manliness in america and historically whenever we see a threat to masculinity, we see a greater rollback of women's rights and a subjugation of women with. now, women are dying as a result of gender discrimination in this country in less dramatic ways than the ways i've just outlined. for the first time since 1918, women's life expectancy is shortening. not one state in the entire union received a passing grade in the woman's report card issued by the national women's

law center. not one state in the union. and the united states as a whole received a failing grade. and our infant mortality rate, as i mentioned before, is appalling. we are, i'm sorry, we are 29th in the world, and those are not the most current numbers. if you talk to researchers from the cdc, they'll tell you that they think when the new numbers come out, we're going to slip to 34th place. how could this be? how could this be the richest nation in the world? in our nation's capital, african-american babies are dying at four times the rate of caucasian babies. now, i actually the lost a baby at birth, and i can tell you that it was one of the most devastating experiences of my life. probably the most devastating experience of my life. it's a scar that stays with you

forever, but i was fortunate because i was able to go to another doctor. i had insurance. i was able to afford the tests that could tell me what happened so that i could try again successfully. but what about these women who face malnutrition, who have premature births, who can't afford prenatal care, who don't have insurance? what hope is there for them? a startling new study has shown that women in this country pay hundreds of dollars more for insurance than men, and i know we've talked about the so-called -- or people have talked about the so-called benign gender wage gap, and we know that it's true. women don't have the same work record as men, that i they don't have the same opportunities for advancement, that they don't have the same ability to be promoted. but even a woman who works full

time her entire life will make on average $700,000 less than a man. and for women of color the number is even higher. that's a lot of money that could have gone a very long way to purchase insurance, better health care and better nutrition. women still are not included as important subjects of research in medical schools, and we're still hardly included in clinical trials. now, why does this matter? it matters because for many m diseases -- many, many diseases women present with symptoms different from men. cardiovascular disease, many cancers, hiv/aids, and the

treatments and medications that we have are different from men. women in this country die more, or i should put it the other way, more women this this country die from heart disease and stroke than men according to the american heart association, and only 8% of primary care doctors in this country know that. my friend paula was going to a doctor who was an internist with a specialty in cardiology. both her parents had died young of heart disease. her brother at 46, only a few years older than she was, had already had a quadruple bypass. paula began to feel ill. she didn't have crushing chest pains, but she had some discomfort, some nausea, some dizziness. she kept calling this doctor. nothing's wrong with you, it's just stress, and i so clearly remember her telling me the only

reason i'm stressed is because i don't feel well. finally, and this is what the doctor thinks saved her life, her husband happened to be late one morning when she was going, before going to work and he came out of the bathroom to find paula collapsed on the floor. she was rushed to the hospital, she spent two weeks in the icu, and they performed a quadruple bypass. but still her doctor was insistent, your symptoms weren't typical, he said. that's right, they weren't typical of a man. phyllis greenberger who's the president of the society for women's health research told me that they have been trying for years to get minorities and women included in the clinical trials and then having the results analyzed because for too long the women might have been included in the trials, but then the results were thrown out.

and what she said is that it amounts to women's health in this country is really, really getting short shrift. so here we are in 2009. young women routinely are getting fired when they become pregnant in stark violation of the law, and they don't do anything about it for two reasons. one, because they don't know it's against the law because the law's not enforced, and, two, because they're afraid that if they make a fuss about it, they'll be blacklisted in their industries. one in every four adolescent girls has some form of sexually-transmitted disease. our teenage pregnancy rate is soaring, we have the highest in the western world. we have a popular culture that denigrates women that would rather have media-manipulated

mommy wars and fights rather than engage in a serious dialogue, national conversation about advancing women's rights. take something that may seem so silly, the word housewife. it was a word that feminists really tried to abolish from our vocabulary. a woman married to her house. i remember being very, very happy when my daughter was invited to a halloween party, and there were many things that she could go as, and they listed them. and one of them was housewife. and she came to me and said, mommy, what is a housewife? and i thought, yes! but now the term housewife is back envogue. we see the real housewives of atlanta, the real housewives of new york and the women they show are competitive and grasping and argue over the most inane things as though real stay-at-home moms

really have only this on their mind. no. we are a society where 500 women, servicewomen in iraq and afghanistan have reported being sexually or physically abused in one year. and don't forget that's a number that is under what it probably is because when i say reported, most of these women according to the miles foundation are put back in the units where they were attacked, and there's a real fear about retribution. 800,000 returning female vets in america are homeless. this is the payback because we don't have appropriate treatment

for post-traumatic shock syndrome that many of them come back with. we don't have housing facilities for them and their children, and we don't have child care for them. and then this last number i'm sure you'll find as devastating as i do, between 14 and 16 million families in america experience some kind of food insecurity. that's a euphemistic term for hunger. and 60% of these families are headed by women. can you imagine what it would be like if you constantly had to think about buying food for your children? are you going to drive to work and use money for gasoline, or are you going to put food on the table? are you going to buy high blood pressure medicine that you need or give your children the next meal? your son's asthma pump, are you going to go see your elderly dependent dad, or are you going

to use the money to feed your children? but this is the reality for so many people in this country. this is another face of sexism in america, and it is alive and well and in our future, but we don't have to let it. because we know that the next chapter has yet to be written, and there's so many things that we can do. and what's wonderful today is that so many of them we can do without getting up from our computers. we can look at women's enews which is a wonderful, wonderful web site and see the issues that they cover, or women's media center. we can sign up from alerts from n.o.w., from the feminist majority or just a google alert. and believe me, if i can figure be out how to do this, anybody can figure out how to do it and they will send you updates, gender discrimination, prenatal care, sexual harassment, and they will send you weekly,

daily, however often you want to see them alerts. you can sign petitions. you can write to your congress people or call them on the phone. they really, really want to hear from you. you can ask local bookstores like barnes & noble to sponsor events where women can talk about their work. you can ask your local hospital to do women's health day through your community centers. you can look at your children's schools and see if women are really, really integrated into the curriculum. in women's history, if they're reading books about women, if they're reading books by women, if they hear about the contributions of women scientists and not just marie coury. curie. you can talk to your children. tell your daughters especially not to see one another, other women as adversaries which is very much a media creation but understand that the issues that unite women are far, far greater

than the issues that divide them. we can use our power as consumers. don't buy our or children or our grandchildren bratz dolls, for example, the only toy that was singled out by the american psychiatric association as harmful to girls' development. don't let them buy t-shirts that say hooters in training or playground pimp. use our power. let's not go to movies that demean women or exalt violence against them. protest. tell your friends to stay away. write letters to the producers that we are not going to see this anymore. we don't want this to continue. we can lobby in washington, we can run for office, there is not a thing that women can't do do. we have a president who listens to us. women put him in power, now i think we have to make our voices heard. but first i think it's the tremendously, tremendously important to know our rights.

i hope that the truth will make us free, but first i hope it makes us fighting mad. thank you. [applause] i'll be happy to answer some questions if anyone has questions. >> right over your shoulder is ronald reagan. would you talk a little bit ant the legacy of the reagan -- about the legacy of the reagan years for women? >> actually the reagan years started a real backlash against women. tremendous cutbacks in funding, funding in the wic program, a real almost war on women. the republican party became targeting women, feminists, anti-era. one of the things that reagan did most dramatically was the fictionalized but often-told the story of the welfare queen whose

race was never stated but, nonetheless, understood. this woman had numerous husbands and drove around in cadillacs all the time never existed but became a very, very popular figure. i think that reagan was really the start, however much he's been lauded, of a real anti-woman bent in american society, and the start of an us against them syndrome which we've seen carried over really through the second bush administration. yes. >> i'm not too clear about hate crimes, but i understand there is such a category. and i was wondering if anyone is pushing through congress any legislation, any bill so that crimes that are directed against women fall into the category of hate crimes. >> you know, i honestly don't know if there's anything current, but i'll be glad if you give me your card, i'll be glad to check it, and i will definitely get back to you. i'm not aware of anything that

is putting women in the category. of course, there is the violence against women act that was written by joe biden and passed, actually, in 1994, but i don't know that women have been part of the violence in term thes of the hate crimes. yeah. >> when you look at the countries that are in advance of ours in terms of their policies and predicament of women, is it media, is it legislative, is it health-driven, what is it that you see as the big distinct between those country cans -- distinction between those countries and the u.s.? any one that stands out? >> that's a wonderful question. well, i've often felt that sexism is america's default setting, and i think that we have worked very, very hard in this country to push back

against that. i don't know that that's true so much in other countries, and i think we would have to delve into the history of america as opposed to the history of other countries like norway, sweden, finland, philippines do better than we do, many m countries do better than we do. but i would say it's probably a mix of many issues, the media, the employment situation, health care. it's hugely complicated. but it is a lot -- it would take me longer to explain than i think we can do here. yes. >> [inaudible] so-called frontier mentality? >> that's what i was going to say, i do think it does, most definitely. i think there is that kind of cowboy ethos and kind of a celebration of the go-it-alone mentality, a celebration of the manly man, that kind of rigor, and that's why i said it would

go too long the, but i think that also came with reagan, the exaltation of individualism. and the other thing, i think, just to come back to your question as i was thinking about this now, part of what reagan did was make government the enemy, and i really think that that is an unfortunate legacy not only for women, but the entire country. because many of these remedies are remedies that really the government has to mandate. but i do think history's tremendously important. i'm a historian, so that's always my first response. [laughter] yes. >> i don't know, probably in your reading you've run across this, but there's a lot of, a lot of philosophers and people we're talking -- knee chi, even, about the coming in of feminine. not making them more masculine,

but the coming in of the feminine. and i'm noting on the shelf here books about 2012 that the world is going to end as we know it, and i really think that coming into the feminine and that -- i haven't read that much about the 2012 thing, but there is something going back to ped resty and the greeks and the romans that we may be at a halfway point in history, and it'll be the coming into the feminine that'll be the difference, if i'm right. >> well, we'll have to wait and see. i have really no way of responding other than perhaps you're right. i don't know. okay. well, thank you very, very much for coming. any other -- okay, well, thank you. i'd be happy to sign some books now for those of you who would like. [applause] >> professor barbara berg taught at sarah lawrence college, yale

medical school and columbia university. her writings have appeared in the was post, new york times magazine and ladies' home journal. for more information visit barbaraberg.com. >> pulitzer prize-winning author neil sheehan has a new book out, "a feehery peace in a cold war." what is an icbm? >> it's a rocket with a hydrogen bomb in its warhead. it's fired up into space, it travels through space at 16,000 miles an hour for 6-7,000 miles and then it would come down on its target. it crosses -- there's no way to stop it. they've never been used. the whole point of -- you and i would probably not be having this conversation if it wasn't for these people. they built this weapon not to make war with it, but as bernard sh reeve would say over and over

again, this is the first weapon in the history of human kind which is being built not to use in war, but to deter war. >> i wanted to start with what an icbm was because i think that tells the story of these scientists who helped create it. do you want to tell me about bernard? >> he was 6 years old when he came here in germany during world war i two months before we declared war on germany. he grew up down in texas, got into the army air corps and was a protege of general arnold who was the founder of the modern, the u.s. air force during world war ii. then with the work on scientific, bringing science into the air force, the utilized science and saw that this weapon would guarantee the peace because if we had it, we could deter the russians from doing anything that would trigger a nuclear war. and then we ended up, he ended

up creating a nuclear stalemate. he's referred to as the nuclear people as mutual assured destruction. in other words, neither side could get a surprise attack on the other because they would destroy themselves in the same process. >> in the book you talk about the resistance that the team had putting this together. can you talk a little bit about that resistance? >> sure. the -- because this is a book not about hardware, but about people. they had tremendous resistance from curtis lemay who was the head of the strategic air command, the great bomber leader from world war ii, who became -- who went over the edge in his later years and became the model for the general in cube rick's dr. strangelove. jack d. ripper was the general's name. sleeve and the people who worked with him ran into tremendous

resistance, and they got to eisenhower, and he understood what they were trying to do and gave them carte blanche just in time. he signed off on december 13th, and he had his heart attack ten days later. >> how long have you been researching this book? >> i worked on the book for 14 years altogether but ten intensive years. i did 52 interviews with schreever, interviewed everybody who worked with him chasing the grim reaper because these were older men. he told everybody he worked with, talk to this man, tell him the truth. and he gave me all of his papers and his diary, all of which were terribly valuable because -- but this is not, this book is written not as an academic history, it's written as a fast-paced narrative in novelistic form because i believe in recreating history for the reader, bringing the

reader into history. and that's what i do here. >> fifteen years of research, that's a long time. did your views on the cold war change at any point during that time? >> i realized -- yes. because we all think of the cold war as one long nuke ice age, and i discovered through this, through writing this book that it was not. that in the beginning, and it's the period that was overlooked which is one of the reasons i wanted to write this book. in the beginning of the cold can war, it was a very warm confrontation between the soviet union and the united states with both sides jockeying for power. and if either side had made a misstep at that time, we would have had nuclear war and the end of the northern hemisphere because these weapons don't just destroy cities, they create ecological effects. they block out the sun, you get nuclear winter with, you'd have destroyed the whole northern hemisphere in a war between the two sides. and schreever and company

prevented that from happening. >> are there schreever's in the military right now? >> i would hope they are. i don't know, but i hope they are. this man was very famous within the air force, and he game the father of -- became the father of the modern high-tech logical air force. this book is not about technology, it's about people, but when he died, there are ten four-star generals in the u.s. air force. nine of them marched behind his coffin. the chief of staff at the time said we're not going to bury him as a four-star general, we're going to bury him as a chief of staff. it was quite a moving occasion. >> the author is neil sheehan, the book is "a fiery peace in a cold war." thank you so much. >> thank you. >> did you know you can view booktv programs online? go to booktv.org. type the name of the author, book or subject into the search

area in the upper left-hand corner of the page. select the watch link. now you can view the entire program. you might also explore the recently on booktv box or the featured programs box to find and view recent and featured programs. >> fox news contributor michelle malkin is our guest today on booktv's in depth. the blogger, columnist and author of four books including the best-selling culture of corruption takes your calls, e-mails and tweets. three hours with michelle malkin today on booktv. >> author robert carroll, give us an update on your lbj volume. >> well, i'm doing the fourth one. the third one i got the national book award here about five years ago. and i'm, well, this is a long

book, and i'm sort of in the middle of it now. it's, you know, lyndon johnson, president, civil rights, vietnam, turning points in american history, so it's an interesting book to do. interesting for me to try to do it. >> when do you foresee it being finished? >> i think i have about two more years' work on this. >> how many years of your professional life have been devoted to lyndon johnson? >> well, i started -- i have to date it back. the power broker came out in -- that was my first book by robert moses -- came out in '74, and i started in '76 on lyndon johnson. do i want to add this up? it's 33 years. [laughter] >> what first sparked you, your interest in lbj? >> oh, good question. you know, i never look at my books as biographies. i never want to do a book just about a great man. but i'm interested in this political power and how it works and using a man's life to show it. so with rob